Wednesday, February 15, 2017

[NY Post] Imagine a city where 265 days a year, the temperature rises above 95 degrees F (35 C).
The residents of Darwin in 2090 will not have to imagine it, because for them, it may well be their reality.
As Australians endure the summer of the seemingly never-ending
heatwave, a new report from the Climate Council essentially has one
message.
Get used to it.
If the country’s greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current pace, it’s going to get much worse.
The independent research body predicts a rapid rise in extreme heat
in Australia in the next 73 years, with heatwaves in all Australian
capital cities predicted to start earlier and last longer as the effects
of greenhouse gas emissions bite in the next decade.
According to the Climate Council’s Cranking up the Intensity: Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events
report, by 2030, the number of extremely hot days — classified as
maximum temperatures of more than 35C — are tipped to climb in all
capital cities.
But it is the Australia inhabited by this generation’s grandchildren,
2090, where the heat will really be on, if greenhouse gas emissions
worldwide fail to meet current reduction targets.
By that year the report predicts Darwin will have a staggering 265 days each year above 35C.
The current average is 11.
The predictions are also frightening in other Australian cities. Read More

[Scientific American] Predicting earthquakes is the holy grail of seismology. After all,
quakes are deadly precisely because they’re erratic—striking without
warning, triggering fires and tsunamis, and sometimes killing hundreds
of thousands of people. If scientists could warn the public weeks or
months in advance that a large temblor is coming, evacuation and other
preparations could save countless lives.
So far, no one has found a reliable way to forecast earthquakes, even
though many scientists have tried. Some experts consider it a hopeless
endeavor. “You’re viewed as a nutcase if you say you think you’re going
to make progress on predicting earthquakes,” says Paul Johnson, a
geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. But he is trying anyway,
using a powerful tool he thinks could potentially solve this impossible
puzzle: artificial intelligence.
Researchers around the world have spent decades studying various
phenomena they thought might reliably predict earthquakes: foreshocks,
electromagnetic disturbances, changes in groundwater chemistry—even
unusual animal behavior. But none of these has consistently worked.
Mathematicians and physicists even tried applying machine learning to
quake prediction in the 1980s and ’90s, to no avail. “The whole topic is
kind of in limbo,” says Chris Scholz, a seismologist at Columbia
University’s Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory.
But advances in technology—improved machine-learning algorithms and
supercomputers as well as the ability to store and work with vastly
greater amounts of data—may now give Johnson’s team a new edge in using
artificial intelligence. “If we had tried this 10 years ago, we would
not have been able to do it,” says Johnson, who is collaborating with
researchers from several institutions. Along with more sophisticated
computing, he and his team are trying something in the lab no one else
has done before: They are feeding machinesraw data—massive sets of
measurements taken continuously before, during and after lab-simulated
earthquake events. They then allow the algorithm to sift through the
data to look for patterns that reliably signal when an artificial quake
will happen. In addition to lab simulations, the team has also begun
doing the same type of machine-learning analysis using raw seismic data
from real temblors.
This is different from how scientists have attempted quake prediction
in the past—they typically used processed seismic data, called
“earthquake catalogues,” to look for predictive clues. These data sets
contain only earthquake magnitudes, locations and times, and leave out
the rest of the information. By using raw data instead, Johnson’s
machine algorithm may be able to pick up on important predictive
markers. Read More

[Indian Economist] The immense challenge of climate change has caused myopia among a lot of
politicians, sending them into a self-destructive state of denial. More
quietly, though, that immensity has triggered another kind of myopia,
this one among conservationists. In focusing on the staggering planetary
impacts of greenhouse emissions, they are losing sight of the other
ways that human beings lay a heavy hand on the planet.
Last summer, a team of biologists led by Paul R Ehrlich of Stanford University, the author of The Population Bomb (1968), published an article in the journal Science Advances,
setting out the problem in stark terms. The average rate of vertebrate
species loss over the past century has been up to 100 times higher than
the average background rate of extinction, and roughly 60 per cent of
large animal species (most of them in the developing world) are
threatened with extinction. Another recent major study,
this one by the ecologist William Ripple of Oregon State University and
his colleagues, comes to depressingly similar conclusions.
The Ehrlich and Ripple teams pointedly note that much of the threat
comes not from the indirect effects of climate change, but from direct
killing by humans – primarily poaching, the trade in bushmeat, wildlife
trafficking, and human-wildlife conflict over resources. Their findings
are both alarming and oddly promising as we gauge the future of
conservation. There is still time to soften the blow of this sixth
extinction, but only if we look honestly at the causes of this
catastrophe-in-the-making and alter our behaviour in rapid,
well-informed ways.
‘If the currently elevated extinction pace is allowed to continue,’ the
Ehrlich report says, ‘humans will soon (in as little as three human
lifetimes) be deprived of many biodiversity benefits. On human time
scales, this loss would be effectively permanent because in the
aftermath of past mass extinctions, the living world took hundreds of
thousands to millions of years to re-diversify. The evidence is
incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in human
history and highly unusual in Earth’s history.’ Read More

[Ancient Origins] The Hopi were watching the sun rise and set at specific points on the
horizon from fixed locations in their villages long before the Spaniards
arrived in 1540. Many of their most important ceremonies were based on
the sun’s location; the equinox, the summer and winter solstice, and
the halfway points between the two.
The Spaniards found them early in the morning, looking east, waiting for
the sun to rise and praying the earth would stay on its delicate
balance and not roll over. The Spanish called them Moqui or people with running noses. The Hopi called themselves the Peaceful People or the Peaceful Little Ones, ( Hopitu-Shi-nu-mu).
The Spaniards did not know what to make of the nine large, peaceful
villages on three mesas and the people who showered them with
hospitality, corn, melons, peaches, and bright colored weavings and
baskets. Why would anyone live in this location with no running water,
no soil, no beneficial weather for their crops, and no trees to build
their homes?
The Hopi Guardian (Maasaw), that saved the Hopi before a great flood and
brought them to this location after traveling east over a large ocean,
showed them the exact location where he wanted them to live. He also
told the peaceful people to expect other races to come to their land in
the future, but not to resist or fight them but to welcome them. The
Hopi welcomed the Spaniards for the next 140 years, or until 1680 when
the Spaniards tried to change their religion. This was to be the only
time the Hopi rose in anger and they drove the Spaniards off to the
east. Here the Spanish inhabited the villages of Zuni, Acoma, Taos, and
other villages that lived on rivers with running water and they
converted them to their Catholic religion. The Hopi still wait for their
long lost white brother to return to their villages and complete their
ceremonial cycles as Maasaw had instructed them.
In 1882 the United States government created the Hopi Reservation. The
land was so poor that no one wanted to move the Peaceful People, so the
Hopi still occupy the land that they were given in the beginning. They
do not consider themselves to be on a reservation; they are at home,
exactly where they are supposed to be. They have never changed their
religion.
Historians believe that the village of Oraibi on Third Mesa is the
oldest continuously inhabited village in the United States, although
many suggest that Shongopovi, on Second Mesa was really the oldest site,
and known as the navel.
It is the Hopi belief that the period of time we live in today is the
fourth time the Creator has tried to populate the planet. This might
explain many of the ancient ruins— pyramids, stone circles, and
underground chambers— that no one has an explanation for today. The
first world was destroyed by fire, the second by ice, and the third by a
great flood. The first two events happened at a predetermined time and
the third, the great flood, came early, or ahead of its time. How
would past civilizations leave us this message?
What structure could they build that would withstand the fire, the
ice, and the water? What measurement system would they use to convey
the message? Read More

Thursday, February 02, 2017

[Wired] Last March, a paper by a geoscientist named Rob DeConto came out in Nature.
And as far as geology papers go, it was a big deal: It outlined a new
paradigm for how Antarctic ice sheets are impacted by climate change. As
the oceans and atmosphere warm, they don’t just melt the ice from
below; they create honking cracks in glaciers that make it easier for
large chunks of ice to break off, slip into the ocean, and disappear.
The effects on sea level rise? They could be almost twice what scientists had predicted for the end of the century.
News of that paper soon landed on the desk of Jerry Brown, governor of California and fired-up proponent of climate change science.
Now, he has convened a group of seven scientists, including DeConto, to
sift through that study and other recent research to calculate new
projections for sea level rise—and, importantly, think about what it
could mean for California’s coast. Over the next three months, the team
will read, discuss, and synthesize. Eventually, they’ll arrive at
numbers. And those numbers will have huge implications for the Golden
State’s infrastructure, planning, and the budgets that support them.
In part, Brown formed this committee because an earlier report on sea level rise,
just five years old, might already be out of date. The governors of
California, Oregon, and Washington commissioned that report in 2010 to
describe how sea level rise would affect the west coast in 2030, 2050,
and 2100. Since it was released in 2012, California agencies from
Caltrans to the state energy commission have used it to make decisions
about huge coastal investments and infrastructure, says Gary Griggs, an oceanographer at UC Santa Cruz who was involved with the report. He’s now leading the current committee.
The stakes are high, says David Behar, the climate program director for
San Francisco’s public utilities commission. A few feet of sea level
rise make a huge difference for shoreline mapping, say, to figure out
what areas need to be protected from flooding. Planners not only need to
consider the likely level of sea level rise in 2100 (the 2012 report
put it around three feet) but also the 5.5 foot rise in the worst-case
scenario, plus the 42 inches added by rare but massive storms.
(Infrastructure planning isn’t the most optimistic of endeavors.) With
prominent, heavily-trafficked locations like San Francisco’s Embarcadero
and Oakland Airport just a few feet away from sea level, the cost of a
few extra feet of ocean could be billions of dollars. Read More

[Science Mic] In grim climate news, a new report by
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warns that, while
sea levels are rising around the world, they're rising faster than the
global average along much of the U.S. coastline — including along the
Northeast Atlantic.

"The ocean is not rising like water would in a
bathtub," NOAA oceanographer and lead author of the report William Sweet
said in a statement. "For example, in some scenarios sea levels in the
Pacific Northwest are expected to rise slower than the global average,
but in the Northeast they are expected to rise faster."

The NOAA report, co-authored by the Environmental
Protection Agency, the South Florida Water Management District, the
U.S. Geological Survey and researchers from Rutgers and Columbia
universities, is
designed to help U.S. communities prepare and plan for possible
consequences of sea level rise. It outlines "six global sea level rise
scenarios (low, intermediate low, intermediate, intermediate high, high
and extreme) decade by decade for this century."

As CBS News
reported Tuesday, "In the mildest projected scenario, global sea levels
will rise by about one foot by the end of this century. In the
worst-case scenario, global sea levels will rise by 8.2 feet."

CBS News also reported that even if we don't reach
the absolute worst-case predictions, U.S. residents will still suffer —
"researchers have estimated that a lower rise of 6 feet would be enough
swallow up the homes of about 6 million Americans." Read More

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About LORI TOYE

Author and mystic Lori Toye has written fourteen books dealing with geographic changes in the Earth and how we can respond to these changes to create peace and harmony and advance our own spiritual growth and self-development. Topics include "Building the Seamless Garment - Revealing the Secret Teachings of Ascension and the Golden Cities," a book filled with lessons that focus on the hidden teachings of Ascension - the spiritual and mental process and the spiritual techniques that can free us from the confines of the need to reincarnate. Toye also created the first Earth Changes Map in 1989 delineating future changes to the Earth's geography, as well as the I AM America Atlas, a full color atlas of the I AM America Maps, featuring many new maps and prophecies. Originally published more than 20 years ago before public awareness of the serious environmental issues of Global Warming and Climate Change, Lori has been featured on NBC, FOX, UPN, London's Carlton Television, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.